Seren Books Archives - Page 14 of 20

Posted on November 5, 2015 by Simon appleby

Remember, Remember

Our Marketing Assistant, Jess, discusses the relationship between history, identity and literature.

Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

It’s been 410 years since Guy Fawkes tried to blow up parliament and we’re still talking about it. Granted trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament (with the king inside) is a pretty big deal, and it’s fascinating to think what Britain might have become if Fawkes had succeeded. Would it even be much different to the way it is now?

We have this idea that we must remember the important moments in history because if we do they won’t happen again. If we remember that Hitler was a bad man we’ll be able to prevent anyone like him from rising to power again, and if we remember that trying to prevent interracial marriage is just plain silly we’ll be a better society. Of course that’s not quite how the world works. Sadly there are still plenty of horrible people in politics, and it’s only in recent years – this year in the case of the United States – that gay marriage has been legalised.

Basically, we never learn, and this is true of our own histories too.

No matter who we are, where we go or what we do, we always find ourselves drawn back to our pasts; our decisions and experiences creep up on us like waves, slowly advancing until we’re caught in the tide and pulled back to something we’d forgotten, whether by accident or by choice. It could be anything from a faint whiff of perfume that reminds you of your grandmother’s old house, or a song you hear that takes you right back to your school days because it was playing everywhere and dammit now it’s stuck in your head again. You’ll be humming it for weeks.

This is particularly true of writers, or at least that’s what I’ve discovered in my experience. Authors can write a huge amount of different stories in their lifetime, but no matter how different the story is, no matter how different the characters or the setting are, there will always be those themes that authors just can’t help going back to.

It’s true of our authors, too. In Anne Lauppe-Dunbar’s debut novel, Dark Mermaids, published earlier this year, our protagonist Sophia finds herself haunted by her past no matter how hard she tries to run from it. Set in Germany, the book itself is something of a link back to Anne Lauppe-Dunbar’s own family history; I interviewed Anne here about her startling debut, and wasn’t at all surprised to discover that she’s working on another novel set in Germany. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Anne in person, and it’s clear from the way she talks about her writing how passionate she is about these Germany-based stories.

Francesca Rhydderch’s prize-winning debut, The Rice Paper Diaries, also draws on personal family history, and the characters in Mary-Ann Constantine’s debut, Star-Shot, just can’t help being drawn to the National Museum Cardiff, a building that is literally full of our history.

Then we have our New Stories from the Mabinogion. Our authors took the tales from The Mabinogion and placed them wherever, and whenever, they saw fit, leaving us with stories set during the Second World War and stories set in outer space. Fairy tales, folktales and legends are the first stories we’re ever introduced to, and we continue to come across them even when we might not realise it. What is Pretty Woman if not a slightly updated Cinderella story? What is The Phantom of the Opera if not yet another spin on Beauty and the Beast?

Try as we might we can’t stop returning to these old stories, whether they’re stories everyone knows or stories from our own personal histories. They just keep coming back, and all we can do is keep telling them.

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Witch

This week’s poem is a section from Damian Walford Davies’ second collection Witch, just in time for Halloween!

With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, Damian Walford Davies’ Witch offers a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century. The poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the ‘making’ of a witch. The speakers – from Thomas Love the priest, the villagers who slowly succumb to suspicion and counter-accusation, the ‘discoverer of witches’ Francis Hurst, and the ‘witch’ herself – authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.

An extract from Witch

She was threshing out
a prayer from deep inside

her chained throat’s
gabble. The air was dizzy

with her dirt. Which art,
she kept repeating,

which art in, as if the once
lithe tongue were damned

to dwell on it. Hustling
clouds let sunlight flush

in pools; she sprang
and chased it, thwacking,

thwacking back again
along her jangling leash.

Did they expect she’d
partner them in one

last meek pavane?
She scratched and bit,

lapsed sullen. At the gate
they bound her wrists

until the knot was
knuckled like a fist

and dragged her bucking
in the dirt. I followed

in her rut and fierce
curlicues, like the carving

of the vine stock’s sudden
flourish into grapes.

Shouldered like a sheaf,
bare hockshins shocking

white, she felt the press
of bodies pitching up

against the pikes. Each
rung made her trussed

bulk skip. He botched
the roping-up, the halter

like a bridle round her
mouth. She turned to him

with squally eyes. Her feet
on his, he held her like

a husband by the waist,
and let her go.

Order Witch from our website.

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Simon appleby

Spooktacular Books

As Halloween approaches, the Seren team share some of their favourite spooky books!

Amy | Poetry Editor

“Damian Walford-Davies’ poetic play-for-voices Witch, is a profoundly disturbing portrait of a village in Suffolk in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the 17th century.

I was lucky enough to see a debut performance of this in the Aberystwyth Arts Centre where some terrific poets like Matthew Francis and Tiffany Atkinson played some of the main parts of the villagers slowly succumbing to the tense atmosphere as they became embroiled in suspicion and counter-accusation. I agree with Bernard O’Donoghue who calls Witch ‘an unsettling and original masterpiece, addressing our world as much as 1640s England.’”

Rosie | Marketing Officer

“I love all things Gothic and ghosty, so picking one story to talk about was a pretty hard task.

The one I keep going back to isn’t technically a ghost story at all, but is possessed with an overpowering sense of haunting– I’m talking about Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

Du Maurier is an absolute genius and (IMHO) Rebecca is her most well-known novel for a very good reason. The story is so compelling that if I had to choose between carrying on reading and free pizza, I might just pass on the pizza. Shocking, I know.

What I love most about Rebecca is that even though we never gain a full picture of the title character, she pervades every aspect of the story as an inescapable, mystifying presence. The narrator’s recurring self-doubts and feelings of inadequacy make her truly relatable, too. Definitely one to take a look at if you haven’t already!”

Jess | Marketing Assistant

“I don’t tend to read much horror because I’m a huge wuss; I don’t even like watching Shaun of the Dead on my own. That being said, I’ve always loved spooky stories, particularly ghost stories. We like scaring ourselves. ~~I’m sure Freud would have a lot to say about that.~~

Ghost stories, particularly ghost stories set in decrepit houses, are my favourite kind of spooky read for Halloween. I recently read The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and adored it; I love its setting of post-war Britain, of a time in which the aristocracy were beginning to fade away and lose their place in society, and I love its atmosphere. Atmosphere is what makes a ghost story for me, and it seeps from the pages of this book. It reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, another favourite of mine, in that the house is as much a character as it is a setting. It’s a brilliant book – give it a read!”

Rebecca | Editorial Assistant for Poetry Wales

“Around this time each year I dig out an old battered copy of M.R. James’ Collected Ghost Stories and read about three or four and then put the book away again for the following year. I do this because they are so good, I want to savour the collection for as long as possible. This year I will have read the final few. What will I do next year? Probably start from the beginning again!”

What are some of your favourite reads for the spooky season?

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – The Witch Bag

This week’s poem comes from Sarah Corbett’s second collection, The Witch Bag, published in 2002.

“Poetry as white-knuckle ride” is how Poetry Wales described Sarah Corbett’s debut, The Red Wardrobe. Her eagerly-awaited second collection, The Witch Bag, is as powerful as its predecessor, and is sure to cement Corbett’s reputation as one of the rising stars of British poetry. The title poem evokes a spellbinder who is both “weightless, thin as pond moss” and “blacker than the pond’s belly.” ’The Kitchen God’ is a series of erotic love sonnets; ’My Son the Horse’ is part of an astonishing group of poems about the birth of a son; ’Czech Pieces’ records vivid impressions of Eastern Europe; the final section focuses on the death of a father. This poet, in sensuous and evocative language, conjures intimate worlds; her subjects are often fearlessly personal: birth, death, and love in all its manifestations.

The Witch Bag

Remember me. I am the woman
who shook her fisted nipples
at the moon,
bearing down the dark streets
that could not take her.

My face broke in two
as I ate its bright cheek,
my hands sudden as marshlight
held before me
into the dark nights that followed.

I am the woman who flew
not only in her dreams,
but remembered the spell as she woke
and hunted sighs like ticks,
dipping and turning as she went.

That woman, weightless thing,
thin as pond moss,
blacker than the pond’s black belly.
She hooks its clammy limbs around her own
and sucks the water into herself.

That woman, without a world,
who goes hopping with one boot
between twilights,
a bagful of grave treasures
lost and lost again –

mask of hair, milk tooth,
heel-bone, blood-purse, name.

Order The Witch Bag from our website.

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Simon appleby

Our Recommended Reads for Halloween!

Start carving your pumpkins and stocking up on sweets, because Halloween is on the way!

What do you mean it’s too early? It’s never too early, and here at Seren we have even more reason to celebrate, because the earliest roots of Halloween date back to the harvest festivals in the Celtic nations, like Wales.

Okay, okay, maybe it’s a tad early to dig those skeletons out of your closet and dangle them from your wall, but it’s never too early – or too late, for that matter! – to read something that will put you in the mood for the spookiest time of the year…

Sing Sorrow Sorrow
ed. Gwen Davies

Sing Sorrow Sorrow is a chilling collection of supernatural myth and otherworldly horror stories from some of Wales’ most exciting new and established authors.

From the dark waters of the Styx to the circling birds of the Mabinogion, from the lonely house to cities of the mind, the contemporary stories in Sing Sorrow Sorrow grow out of European folk, fable, fairy tale and legend – all tales which belong to the domain of the underworld. There are ghosts, murderesses, blood-soaked enchantment, black humour and stories with the darkest twists of the imagination – draw the chair nearer the fire and enjoy.

With contributions from Niall Griffiths, Maria Donovan, Deborah Kay Davies, Gee Williams, Richard Gwyn, Tristan Hughes, Cynan Jones, Matthew Francis, Anne Lauppe-Dunbar, Mary-Ann Constantine, Zillah Bethell, Dai Vaughan, Imogen Herrad, Lloyd Jones, Euron Griffith, Jo Mazelis Glenda Beagan, Alan Bilton, Roshi Fernando, Christine Harrison, Jon Gower, Charlotte Greig.

Witch
by Damian Walford Davies

Sugar Hall
by Tiffany Murray

Easter 1955. As Lilia Sugar scrapes the ice from the inside of the windows and the rust from the locks in Sugar Hall, she knows there are pasts she cannot erase. On the very edge of the English/Welsh border, the red gardens of Sugar Hall hold a secret, and as Britain prepares for its last hanging, Lilia and her children must confront a history that has been buried but not forgotten.

Based on the stories of the slave boy that surround Littledean Hall in the Forest of Dean, this is a superbly chilling ghost story from Tiffany Murray.

You can order all of these books and more from our website!

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – The Formula for Night

This week’s poem comes from Tamar Yoseloff’s latest collection, A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems.

Tamar Yoseloff is a poet whose career has been profoundly influenced by the visual arts. A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems is the eagerly awaited summation of her work, encompassing selections from four published print volumes: Sweetheart, Barnard’s Star, Fetch and The City with Horns (now mostly out of print); and poems from her collaborations with artists: Formerly, Marks and Desire Paths. The book also includes a generous selection of beautiful new poems. The title poem is based upon an installation by Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans. An image from his work, a light sculpture, is used for the cover of the book.

The poet’s first collection, Sweetheart, was a PBS Special Commendation and the winner of the Jerwood/Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. She was the recipient of an Arts Council New Writing award which helped her complete her second manuscript, later published as Barnard’s Star. Of her collaborations, Marks was published as a limited-edition artist’s book and pamphlet by Pratt Contemporary Art in 2007. Desire Paths was a limited-edition portfolio produced by Galerie Hein Elferink in the Netherlands. Both books feature work by artist Linda Karshan.

More recently, Formerly, a chapbook of poems based on forgotten London locations, with accompanying photographs by Vici MacDonald, was the debut publication of their co-founded imprint, Hercules Editions. Formerly was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2012. Exhibitions of the poems and photographs have appeared in two venues in London: the Poetry Society’s Poetry Café and the Saison Poetry Library at the Southbank.

The new poems are often artful explorations of paradox: death/birth, dark/light, clarity/mystery. In the ‘Swimmer of Lethe’ the protagonist says: ‘I’ve mastered surface/ here everything is under.’ Atmospheres are conjured, surfaces interrogated and humans are often found woefully or wonderfully implicated in their settings in unexpected ways. A misunderstood creature, the ‘Muntjac’, is seen with tender clarity ‘Now white with May/tar and fern on his delicate hooves…’. The poet’s vocabulary is spiky, sometimes ferociously so. Sex is another paradox, its violence at times palpable: from ‘Pictures of Spring’: ‘I bend and break, bend/ and break, contort my limbs/ into these lovelocked shapes.’ ‘Hospital Time’: ‘collapses, folds the days into sterile gauze,/ a thousand different words for hurt’ beautifully evokes the estranging, atmosphere of a hospital but slowly evolves to become a moving elegy to the poet’s mother.

The Formula for Night

It’s getting late. Light
floods the public bar,
you’re the final one to leave.
The mirror’s silver eye
gives you back yourself, precise.
You’ve lived your life through
glass, you miss the brush

of skin, someone whispering
your name.You hear it now,
a calling on the wind, insistent,
a small but steady flame.
You carry in your bones a gasp
of summer heat, the formula
for night.You arrive at the end-

of-pier reveal – the heart-stop hour,
when this world briefly yields
to the next: a door that creaks
an inch or two to catch
a blinding beam. You want
to understand what can’t
be seen, the fact behind

the trick, the wires hidden
from your view, the blue breath
that powers the machine.
Raise your eyes to read the stars –
streetlight’s glare has cast them
dark; once-bright bulbs,
trembling elements crack

and fizzle as they die. Their light
is obsolete. But close
your eyes, and still you find
gold impressed beneath
your lids, a moment lived.
And when you open them again,
darkness is what’s left.

Order A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems from our website.

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Simon appleby

An Interview with Mary-Ann Constantine

We had a chat with Mary-Ann Constantine about her debut novel, Star-Shot, which is out today!

Mary-Ann Constantine studies Romantic period literature, with an emphasis on Wales and Brittany, at Aberystwyth University and has published widely in these fields since 1996. Her short stories have appeared over a number of years in New Welsh Review and Planet and her first collection, The Breathing, was published by Planet in 2008. Her second collection, All the Souls, was published by Seren in 2013. Star-Shot is her first novel.

Part fable, part mystery, Star-Shot is a stylish debut novel set in and around Cardiff’s National Museum in a time that is almost, but not quite, our own. As their paths cross in a circumscribed world of benches, parks and galleries, a handful of characters reveal their stories of obsession, loss and recovery, creating a fragile network of relationships which will help to resist the inexorable channels of silence eating into the city.

A brittle young woman sits on a bench in Gorsedd park, conscious of the powerful building behind her; a tall man carries a box full of a strange organic substance up the entrance steps; a young father explains the formation of stars to his tiny son. As university researchers try to map and understand the destructive silence snaking around them, it becomes clear that the linked lives of these and other marginal characters offer ways of countering its effects. Poignant and humorous, Star-Shot is an exploration of how objects and images can focus our grief and desire; it is also a meditation on the regenerative power of garden ponds, and the cosmic significance of frogs.

Was it your intention from the beginning to write a story in which Cardiff’s National Museum plays such a huge part, or did the museum gradually seep into the story while you were writing?

I think it was there as a physical presence from the beginning. The image I couldn’t get out of my head was the first one, of the girl on the bench with a building behind her. Once I realized which building it was, I knew it would be a central character.

Magical realism is a very divisive term. Would you describe your work as magical realism and, if so, what is it that draws you to the genre?

Why is it divisive? Like ‘sci-fi’? Not proper literature? I like stories where odd things happen; and I like fiction that doesn’t completely opt for one side or the other along a border you could loosely call realism. I’ve always liked the work of the Portuguese writer José Saramago and the Italian writer Italo Calvino. They introduce ‘impossibilities’ into everyday life and then – sometimes ruthlessly, far more ruthlessly than I could ever do – see them through. You can read the impossible elements allegorically, metaphorically, but they have to be convincing in the world of the novel or story itself.

Throughout Star-Shot we follow several different characters. Were any of them particularly difficult, or particularly easy, to write?

I have no idea why this happened, but they all just appeared, one at a time, and started talking to each other; and I took an instant liking to them. I’ve not written anything this long before (and yes, I know, it’s pretty short for a novel), but the only other sustained narrative involving a clutch of characters was ‘The Collectors’ in All the Souls, and I had to fight them the whole time – I found them all, in their different ways, unpleasant or failing in some way. This lot (and they really aren’t based on people I know, either, which makes the whole thing even stranger) seemed extremely sympathetic. Even the Professor figure and Luke, both of whom started off as slightly caricatured secondary characters, turned out to have hidden depths. I was worried that the absence of what my kids call ‘bad guys’ might make the story rather insipid. Hope not.

Which skills that you learned from writing short fiction helped you to write longer fiction, and which skills, if any, were more of a hindrance?

I found it a very different process. Stories work round a central image or kernel – and that was what I assumed the girl-on-the-bench-and-building was for a long time. I had the final scene clear in my head too. I was surprised when the distance between them turned out to be not a few hundred words but several thousand. The scenes kept unrolling, short and cinematic. Once I knew who was in them it was a matter of listening in to conversations, and the writing came much more easily than usual.

Finally, what’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?

Tricky; I tend to get absorbed in whatever I’m reading at the time – and I hate ‘best’. But I think possibly the hugely powerful, dark and weird Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson; and two crystal-clear collections by Tove Jansson, The Winter Book and The Summer Book. Perhaps the most important book, though, was Naomi Klein’s discussion of climate change, This Changes Everything.

Don’t forget to enter our competition for a chance to win a signed copy of Star-Shot!

Order Star-Shot from our website.

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – The Death of Doc Emmett Brown in Back to the Future

This week’s poem comes from Jonathan Edwards’ Costa Award-winning debut collection, My Family and Other Superheroes.

My Family and Other Superheroes introduces a vibrant and unique new voice from Wales. The superheroes in question are a motley crew. Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo – all leap from these pages and jostle for position, alongside valleys mams, dads and bamps, described with great warmth. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism. If the author’s subjects have something in common with RS Thomas, or even Terry Street-era Douglas Dunn, his technique and approach owe at least as much to contemporary American poets like James Tate and David Wojahn.

The Death of Doc Emmett Brown in Back to the Future

I sit here in the darkness with my father,
slurping Pepsi, passing popcorn round.
The Libyans come fast around the corner,

pump Doc Brown with automatic fire.
My feet are dangling, inches from the ground.
I sit here in the darkness with my father,

as Marty hits 88 miles an hour,
goes back to ’55, to warn Doc Brown.
The Libyans come fast around the corner,

pump Doc Brown with automatic fire:
he gets up, dusts his bulletproof vest down.
I sit here in the darkness with my father,

who starts to gently snore. Now time goes quicker:
the cinema’s knocked down, moved out of town;
the Libyans come fast around the corner

on DVD. My boy asks for Transformers
instead as, from the wall, his bamp looks down.
I sit here in the darkness with my father.
The Libyans come fast around the corner.

Order My Family and Other Superheroes from our website.

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – The Snake House

This week’s poem comes from Pascale Petit’s third collection, The Huntress, published in 2005.

In Pascale Petit’s highly-charged third collection, a daughter is haunted by her mentally ill mother, and a painful childhood is re-imagined through a series of remarkable and passionate transformations. The feared mother is a rattlesnake, an Aztec goddess, a Tibetan singing bowl, a stalagmite, a praying mantis, a ghost orchid. These culminate in a long central poem where the daughter escapes her huntress as a cosmic stag. Underlying these poems is an intense mystical vision that lifts the dark material of the subject matter above the merely personal.

The Snake House

It’s time to go up to your front door, Mother,
and ring the rattling buzzer of a bell,
the door with two curved fangs.
I go in, into the muscular throat of the hall,
down the tunnel that’s closing now
to a pinpoint of light.
I’m in the swallowing living-room,
washing it for you, half-alive,
like a man preparing for the rain-dance
in the dry arroyo. He reaches
into the pit and washes the snakes
so that later when he dances with the ‘little mothers’
in his mouth, they won’t bite.
I’m a child playing in the pen
with my pet rattlers,
giving them bread and milk.
As long as I’m unscared
they won’t strike. And you’re saying,
“Only a girl-child can do this”.
My cheeks are almost seamless now,
countless grafts hide the necrosis.

Order The Huntress from our website.

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Simon appleby

Seren at Crickhowell Literary Festival

Wales will see the return of the Crickhowell Literary Festival this month, and this year several of our authors are taking part!

Francesca Rhydderch, author of the 2014 Wales Book of the Year The Rice Paper Diaries and co-editor of New Welsh Short Stories, will be in conversation with Oliver Balch, reading from her work and answering any questions from the audience. She will also be leading a Fiction Writing Masterclass!

Poet and novelist Christopher Meredith will be at the festival for an evening of reading and discussion, and several of our other poets will also be reading from their work. Paul Henry and Philip Gross will be reading poems from Boy Running and A Fold in the River inspired by the rivers Usk and Taff, and Anne-Marie Fyfe will be reading from her latest collection, House of Small Absences, while Costa Award-winner Jonathan Edwards will be reading from his own work.

Whether it’s poetry or prose that mosts interests you, there’s something for everyone at Crickhowell this year. Find out more about all of our upcoming events on our website!

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